common use as a printed textile, since the two processes of
hand-weaving and block-printing are not natural neighbours, but this
capacity for taking and holding stains is of great value in
embroidery, since it enables an artistic embroiderer to produce
excellent effects with comparatively little labour. A clever
needlewoman, working upon a fabric which takes kindly to stains, can
apply colour in many large spaces and inter-spaces in her design which
would otherwise have to be covered with stitchery, and in this
way--which is a perfectly accepted and legitimate one--she gains an
effect which would otherwise be costly and laborious.

From the composite nature of this domestic fabric, its cross-weaving
of animal and vegetable fibre, it takes colour irregularly. Every
cross-thread of wool is deeper in tone than the cotton thread it
crosses, and this gives the quality which artists call vivacity or
vibration. Linsey woolsey even when "piece-dyed" has something of this
effect, and judicious and artistic colour treatment would complete its
claims to be considered an art textile.

It is not to be supposed that the weavers themselves can work out
this problem. It will need the direction and encouragement of educated
and artistic women. Taking the fabric just as it exists, it is ready
for the finer domestic processes learned by the women of the South
during the hard years of the Civil War. The clever expedients of
stitchery, the ways in which they varied their simple home-manufactures,
and above all the knowledge gained of domestic "colouring," will be of
inestimable value in the direction of artistic industries. In truth,
Southern women have ways of staining and dyeing and producing
beautiful colour quite unknown to other American women. They know how
to get different grays and purples and black from logwood, and golden
and dark brown from walnut bark, and all the shades of blue possible
to indigo; and yellow-reds from madder, and rose-red and crimson from
pokeberry, and one yellow from pumpkin and another from goldenrod; and
they are clever enough to find mordants for all these dyes and stains,
and make them indelible. It needs exactly the conjunction which we
find in the South, of facile home-weaving, knowledge and practice of
experimental dyeing, and love of practical art, to develop true art
fabrics.

To show what linsey woolsey is capable of, I will instance a material
woven in India in thin woolen strips of about twel